Re: Cops 5: Barney Fife, Now in Real Life!
Maybe when people just start randomly shooting cops on a regular basis -- not the once a year things that scream in the headlines like last year's tragic massacre in Dallas or the seemingly random shooting of the cop in New York a couple of weeks ago -- the cops will finally realize they needed to clean up their act a bit. When it starts to happen -- and make no mistake, it will start to happen -- the cops will have none to blame but themselves. When a law abiding man can get shot to death because he wonders who is on his property at midnight, when a woman dials 911 and dies because she comes out to speak with the very cops she called, how can anyone sit there and say with a straight face this isn't utter madness we're living in? To some people the cops are becoming a bigger danger than the other criminals. And please spare me the crap about how these are isolated, rare, random events and how most encounters with the police are professional and don't result in death. That it happens once is wrong. That it happens over and over and over again is --or should be -- intolerable to all of us. No more can we allow people to make excuses for the police. Rein them in before the good ones start paying for misdeeds of all the bad ones. If there are enough good ones that is. We keep hearing from some of you that 99.9% of them are heroes and professional people who just want to serve their communities. Eff that. If that were true then the good ones would hound the losers until the losers left the profession. They know who these trigger happy idiots are. Until that starts to happen, I will continue to believe that 99.9% of them are not heroes. They are enablers of loser cops who are nothing more than idiots and bullies with badges.
Cops end up shooting people, both innocents and perpetrators, in large part due to a mindset we as a society have created or facilitated. That mindset is that we, the public, are in a constant state of "war" and the police are our soldiers. A war on drugs. A war on terrorism. A war on immigration. We use these terms to whip people into a frenzy on an issue, and the media laps it up.
We dress cops up like soldiers. We give them military titles like Captain, Lieutenant, Sergeant, etc... We even provide them with real military weapons.
We choose to do this. Don't blame the cops. They are just the pitbulls we train to protect us. They are not naturally vicious or evil.
Yeah, so maybe if cops just start getting regularly shot they'll calm down. Good luck with that.
The reason so many people here and in the public at large defend cops as a whole and decry only those actions of the isolated few is because of our own personal experiences.
In my 5+ decades of existence on this planet I've probably had 25-30 interactions with law enforcement officers in their official capacity. A handful of stops for driving too fast. Coming to my house regarding a flood evacuation. Accompanying an ambulance call to a house where I was at. Responding to complaints about fireworks we were shooting off. A few minor fender benders.
In a sizable number of those instances I wasn't particularly excited that I got a chance to interact with them. I was probably even mildly irritated by the event. In a few others I was happy they were there.
But I never felt truly afraid of them. They didn't harm me. They didn't even threaten to harm me. Their business was conducted professionally, for the most part, and we went our separate ways.
That experience is my own, but it's also the experience of a substantial majority of people in this country. It's a little bit like when someone tells you they got sick following a meal at a restaurant where you've eaten many times without incident. You don't get too alarmed about it.
Yes, it is bad when even one person gets killed by the police. We, as a society do need to reevaluate the whole military concept of our police force. But you're off base with quite a lot of this post.
